Singe (12 page)

“S’okay.” Eli was the one who trained the dog to go off-leash in the first place,
heel
and
wait.
She’ll sit on the sidewalk at a crosswalk until you give the command. “Listen, is she—do we know if she’s—?” He can’t bring himself to say it.

Dave answers, the jackass. Eli can’t spot so much as a speck of dog hair on his dark slacks. “We don’t know anything yet,” he says, echoing Chelsea. “The vet said there was nothing to do but wait.”

Dave is a professor of physics at Mount Holyoke, and every word out of his mouth sounds like a lecture. Chelsea does it too, but only when she’s wound. She told Eli she wanted a divorce like she was standing in front of a podium.

“Okay.” Eli backs up until his calves hit the row of chairs, then sinks down. There’s something vaguely comforting about knowing you’re the dumbest person in the room. “So then we’ll wait.”

And that’s exactly what they do, all three of them lined up like birds on a telephone wire, a Discovery Channel special about the Serengeti playing softly on an old TV in the corner. Eli’s head throbs. He fills a cone-shaped cup at the water cooler twice, three times, a fourth. He thinks of Addie in her doorway this morning, the look on her face like he was completely insane to be asking. He thinks of Hester darting out into the road, unknowing, and his stomach roils.

“Do you want to go home, Eli?” Chelsea asks him, gnawing on her thumbnail. Out the window, it’s full dark.

Eli’s just shaking his head when the vet comes through the door from the back, scrubs and one of those little surgical caps like on
Grey’s Anatomy
. “She’s alive,” he pronounces, and all the air whooshes out of Eli. He had no idea how attached he still was to that fucking dog. “We stopped the internal bleeding. It’s touch and go on the right hind leg, and we’re going to need to keep her. But you can see her in a bit, if you’d like.”

They’re only allowed in two at a time so Dave hangs back in the hallway, which Eli thinks is pretty decent coming from a guy who fucked his wife while they were still married. Hester, sweet girl, is out cold. She’s got ugly stitches all along her pale, shaved belly, her leg wrapped up and splinted. There’s dried blood in her shiny blonde coat.

“Shit, Eli,” Chelsea says softly. Eli swallows down the thickness at the back of his mouth. “We should have never bought a dog.”

“She’s okay though.” Eli unlatches the kennel gate and reaches in, running one finger up the middle of Hester’s muzzle. “She’s alive.” He wants to take her home. Fuck his work schedule, she can be a firehouse mascot. “It’s so bare in here. Maybe we could bring some of her toys?”

“Her puppy blanket.” Chelsea leans in, touching her fingertips to Hester’s wet-brown nose. Her cool hair waterfalls over Eli’s arm, no personal space between them at all. She and Hester are the same shade of blonde. “The pink one, you know?”

“I do.” Never mind that it about covers her head now. Eli wonders how long dogs’ memories are, if she remembers her litter or the barn where they all lived, if the pink blanket brings that back. They brought Will’s toys to the hospital that summer too, a baseball and the Micro Machines he was way too old for. Eli remembers organizing them in a semi-circle beside the bed. “Maybe her squeaker too.”

“Yeah.” Chelsea stops stroking Hester’s ear and clasps Eli’s arm instead. “Dave and I will pay for it, okay? It was our fault she got hurt.”

Eli shakes his head. “I’ll help.” Fuck if he’s letting Dave take his dog away too. “We’ll make it work.”

It’s close to one in the morning by the time he gets back to his apartment, the air still and stuffy with a vague barf smell underneath. Eli cranks the AC and opens the windows up anyway—they’re weird in this place, the windows, how they open out on an angle and only halfway. Eli wonders if they’re designed to keep people from jumping. Probably that’s a really morbid thought to have.

He showers up and gets into bed alone, staring at the ceiling. His entire body feels scraped raw and bruised, like maybe he was the one who got hit by some asshole not watching where they were going. He lies there for a while, suddenly awake. He counts to a hundred. Finally he picks up his phone.

Date’s a standing offer
, he texts, once he’s scrolled to Addie’s name in his list of contacts. He lied this morning when he said he didn’t have her number. He got it from Sharpie a few days ago. In reality Eli just wanted to see her face.

He’s not expecting her to text back—it’s late, on top of which she was pretty clear about where he stands with her this morning—which is why he’s so surprised when the phone buzzes on his nightstand a couple minutes later.
Good to know,
is all it says.

It’s not
piss off
, which feels like a start. Eli rolls over again and goes to sleep.

Chapter Eight

Addie isn’t looking forward to work. She has Monday off and she spends the morning cleaning her apartment, scraping out Chicken Cat’s litter box and carting her dirty clothes to the nearby laundromat, speed-reading through three
Us Weekly
s while her uniform basics burble away on the cold cycle. In the afternoon she picks up a gift for her sister-in-law’s baby shower,
Corduroy
and
Guess How Much I Love You
in board book form. As soon as Marina and Phillip announced the kid was a boy, Diana started planning blue-themed events, even contacting the parish office to schedule a baptism. The Manzella family loves a baby boy.

Tuesday morning rolls around way too soon. Addie gets up, feeds the cat, then clomps downstairs and out to Gertie’s parking spot to face the music.

“Let it be a busy day,” she prays as she’s pulling into the station. Later, she’ll wonder if what happens is her fault.

She doesn’t see Eli when she ducks into the kitchen to check the schedule, or when she’s completing her designated chores, making up the beds in the crib and emptying out the trash cans. For a whole ten minutes, she’s hopeful. But then, sure enough, there he is at eight a.m. lineup, standing beside Sharpie while Brooks rattles off their game plan for the day. First on deck: drills. Perfect.

They trudge out to the field at the back of the house, start things off with a few suicide sprints. It’s hot and still no wind at all. Addie can feel the sweat soaking through the back of her T-shirt. She’s a decent runner—she drags herself to the gym a couple of times a week to prepare for hellish moments just like this one—but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make her want to kill herself. Her boobs are heavy in her sports bra. She’s got a stitch in her side. Eli, of course, hardly even seems to be exerting himself, the damp patch on the chest of his station T-shirt the only clue that he’s working at all.

“Look alive, Manzella,” he calls cheerfully. Addie almost hauls off and punches him in the nose.

That’s when the alarm goes off.

“All right, suit up,” Brooks calls, even as the lot of them are already headed inside, scrambling into their turnout gear and loading up the engine. Addie’s driving. Eli swings himself up into the rig behind her and plunks his helmet in his lap—Brooks is back in the jumpseats today, quizzing the candidate on procedure. Addie waits for the all-clear from the rest of the guys and flips the sirens, glancing at the address as she pulls out into the street.

“Hey,” she says, looking at the GPS screen and feeling something like trepidation wash over her, cold even under all her stifling layers. It’s fancy, the software they’ve got now, will show you a street-view along with the location and directions to a fire—the pin’s dropped now on a small single-family on Cypress Street, two blocks from the house where Drew Beecher was killed. “Fuck, Eli,” Addie says, once she’s nodded so he’ll look at it too. “You don’t think—”

“I don’t know,” Eli says, picking up what she’s putting down immediately. “I have no idea.”

Morning traffic parts neatly as they scream past, Addie running every stop sign she sees. Cypress is tree-lined all the way down, none of its namesakes but maples and oaks and pine, plus the occasional paper birch. Firefight in Berkshire County for any length of time and you start to pay attention to trees—a house fire can jump to the brush easy as anything. Company 11 always keeps a chainsaw in the pumper, just in case.

Addie sees the smoke first, thick and black. The GPS beeps as they arrive, plunking a second pin helpfully on the nearest fire hydrant. The engine has a 1,000-gallon tank running down its center, full to the top and enough to fill three paddle pools. On a good day, that would be all the water they needed.

Addie doesn’t think it’s going to be a good day.

The house is completely engulfed, a column of bright, angry orange like something in a movie, ridiculous Hollywood fires where every surface is burning. Addie has never seen a blaze that bright.

“No way,” Eli mutters, strapping on his helmet. “That’s gotta be an accelerant, right?”

Addie only has time for a shrug before launching herself out of the rig. As driver, it’s her job to climb to the roof of the engine and man the pump panel, all the switches and levers that control the hoses. Right away she flips open the main tank valve, starting the water. Then, because Sharpie and Parker are grabbing the crosslays, she yanks the levers to discharge those too—the way Engine 11 is set up, water won’t flow to a hose unless the right knob has been turned. The engines over at Ladder 15 and 9 have gone fully automated, but Addie prefers manual control. The panel has a gauge that lets her monitor how much water is still in the tank, jack the pressure up and down at will. It feels like she’s in charge of the engine instead of the other way around.

“That tree’s gonna go in a second!” Sharpie warns from the ground, pointing to a maple on the edge of the property. It’s huge, its branches dipping right over the side of the house. Sure enough, almost as soon as the words are out of his mouth, up go the leaves. It burns fast.

Too fast.

“It’s doused,” Brooks yells over the radio, confirming Addie’s worst fears. She can see it too, the way the flames eat up certain sections of the trunk in a horrendous, artificial rush. She’s already climbing out from behind the pump panel to get to the deck gun, a roof-mounted water cannon that is the engine’s most powerful fire-fighting tool. The guys call it Big Mama—it delivers 1,000 gallons per minute and shoots water with enough force to knock through walls. Down below, Eli and Brooks are already running a line to the hydrant.

“Watch yourselves,” Addie calls, angling Mama’s steering wheel toward the second story of the house and trusting Sharpie, Parker and the hoses to take care of the maple. The idea is to darken the fire enough so they can get in there with the handlines—control is the name of the game here, and as things stand it’s not even safe enough to try and clear the house. Addie can see a cluster of neighbors gathering across the street out the corner of her eye, a couple of sobbing kids held back by a dark-haired woman. It’s too noisy for her to hear their actual cries.

“Watered up!” Brooks hollers once the lines are linked to the hydrants—a good thing too, since Addie’s let the deck gun rip and the tank’s not going to be able to hold them for long. Sweat’s pouring down her forehead and stinging her eyes. Normally Mama can calm a blaze noticeably in seconds, a minute at the outside, but whatever the hell accelerant this bastard used is stubborn as shit. By the time she pulls the lever to switch over to the auxiliary water supply the flames are less intense, sure, but not by much. Addie’s swearing under her breath when a woman comes careening around from the back of the house in shorts and a tank top, screaming at the top of her lungs and red from head to toe.

“I got a kid in there!” she screeches, and Addie’s heart does a backflip inside her chest.

The paramedics are already converging, two of them running across the lawn with a stretcher. Brooks is striding over too, no doubt trying to get any relevant information he can—how old, which room, boy or girl. A name to shout when they clear the house. The woman’s skin is blistered already, everywhere it isn’t covered by clothes. Addie does a quick calculation using the rule of nines (nine percent for an arm, eighteen for a leg, nine for a head, and so on), and estimates she’s burned on at least fifty percent of her body. Across the street, the neighbor covers her children’s eyes.

Brooks speaks to the burned woman for a minute—she’s still screaming, but Addie can no longer hear her over the whoosh of Mama—and then the paramedics take over. She won’t go at first, kicking and screaming like a silent movie, but finally they manage to sedate her. Addie watches them intubate, then the ambulance speeds away.

Brooks climbs up onto the roof of the engine to survey the burning house. Sharpie and Parker have taken care of the maple tree, at least, chainsawing off a good number of branches and dousing the trunk in flame-retardant foam. Now they’re backing up the water cannon with the hoses. A second pair of EMTs are waiting on the ground, stretcher at the ready. Addie watches Brooks think, eyes grave behind his helmet visor.

“Should I switch off?” she asks over the radio, gesturing to Mama. Mama is so powerful she can compromise the structural integrity of a building if she’s used for too long, even hurt the victims inside. The fire is still raging.

Slowly, Brooks shakes his head.

Addie blows out a breath she can’t hear. “We’re not going in after the kid, are we?”

“Not yet,” Brooks says firmly. Then, over the main frequency so everyone gets the message, “Stand down. That building is not safe.”

“
Cap
.” That’s Eli’s voice over the radio. He was right there as Brooks was talking to the burned woman, all antsy body language, rocking restlessly back on his heels. He hurried around back to investigate afterward, circled around from the other side. Addie can see him on the lawn now, his head angled up at the pumper. “I can get her, I scouted it.” A girl, then. Eli sounds urgent. Addie feels her heartbeat kick up. “Staircase is right off the kitchen, I can get in from the back.”